Hacker News Reader

Comment by aerojoe23 | Hacker News Reader

I love reader mode in Firefox. It will also do text to speech for you.

The voices seem to dependent on something built into the OS. They sound okay on windows and I haven't figured out how to get them to sound good on linux. On windows the voices sound good, but I Wish I could get it to go a little faster. The voices don't sound human so it takes some getting used to.

On linux the voices just sound more harsh. To the point I don't want to use it. If anyone knows a switch to flip or how to install additional voices to make them sound better, that would be great.

View on HN

One of the little feature of reader mode I love is, if you time it correctly (before loading all javascript of the page) you can skip a lot of prompts ( subscribe to read / monthly limit reached and so on )

Try hard refreshing the page after you're in reader mode.

It's only a matter of time before sites start rolling out anti-reader mode "features."

It's already been done. Wired, for instance, only shows you the first paragraph of a story until you've made an account and logged in, even in reader mode.

Surely that's just any halfway-competent pay/sign-up wall, rather than specifically anti-reader mode?

Not necessarily as they still want to be referenced properly.

The workaround was to whitelist Google's spider ips and remove the paywall for those but with the progress of other search engine / social nets it's more complicated to paywall without hurting SEO.

> The workaround was to whitelist Google's spider ips and remove the paywall for those

Isn't that against Google's own policies? I think they call it cloaking.

For sites dependent on link-aggregator sites (such as HN, Tildes, Mastodon, Diaspora, etc.)[1] for spreading and sharing content, hard paywalls tend to very strongly discourage further readership and sharing.

I'm aware that HN has multiple levels of penalties applied to sites / domains, for various reasons. Users may also flag inaccessible content. (I certainly do.)

________________________________

Notes:

1. If you've determined that "etc." is doing much heavy lifting here, congratulations. The resources listed are highly encouraged.

If you wanna split hairs, sure. "Breaking reader mode" is a component of an access wall. For a while a lot of sites didn't have that, so reader mode would work to skip all that.

I stopped using these modes years ago because of inconsistent results that I assume must be from reader-blocking tech.

I stopped using those sites, instead. I figure that if they're so far up in themselves that they want to employ such user-hostile design, I'm probably not missing much if I just move on and read something else.

It's already happenning. Just like adblockers, anything that makes life better for users is actively fought against.

If you're on Firefox, there's an extension called Auto Reader Mode which saves you the game of "click reader mode before the popups appear."

Though I guess this extension is less useful now that many sites are purposely breaking reader mode.

I use Microsoft Edge exclusively for its read aloud function -- it doesn't require reader mode to be activated and has integration with Microsoft's 'natural voice' which is almost indistinguishable from regular speech. Also it will instantly start reading from whatever word you click on which helps with backtracking. The downside, of course, is having to use Edge.

+1 for Edge. Use it on my Macbook and love how it highlights the sentence it is currently reading and scrolls the page down automatically. It is not as good as Google Assistant on android. Google Assistant on android knows to skip past image captions and ads, and it knows when it has reached the end of an article; Edge simply reads everything it sees.

You'd think google would use the same architecture for chrome! I haven't found it to be nearly as useful.

I guess those parts are where Edge cannot use the same services Google uses anyway (since they're not allowed to). And if they have to provide their own TTS anyway, they can just as well improve over Chrome at that point.

How to activate this in Google Assistant? Is there a special application or something? Or do we just have to say "Ok google read this <URL> " ?

open a page you want to be read in Chrome, active google assistant and say 'Read It'. It also works with other Chromium based browsers (Brave and Edge).

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psEX5jPkYiw

For web developers, one thing to keep in mind with text to speech is that you can use the aria-hidden attribute to prevent things (like menus or ads) from being read.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...

If you add that to menus, they will be completely inaccessible to people dependent on screen readers, such as blind people.

Do you know how to enable this in Linux? I don't see a TTS option in reader mode on Firefox.

EDIT: I figured it out. I needed to install speech-dispatcher.

On Ubuntu

> sudo apt install speech-dispatcher

It's available on Linux for me. I'm on Pop! OS 21. The "listen" option is a set of earphones at the top left of the page.

The voices are awful to listen to, though.

Hilariously bad.

iirc, there are third party voices available.

For anyone interested, my hacker news app HACK does both reader node as well as read text to speech. It's brand new so any feedback is welcome:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.h...

It's available on iOS too which uses the built in reader mode of safari.

Just tried it out. I usually use Harmonic, and in general I much prefer the UI - it's more minimalistic, lower contrast, and I prefer the font (Product Sans). It also has a built in ad blocker. However, I appreciate the various filtering options / different feeds and the archive access seems like a really useful feature.

On the whole I think I'll stick with Harmonic, but it looks like it has some potential.

The settings in my app can be customized to make it as minimalist as needed (like hide favicons, hide the metadata, only show titles etc). There’s also settings for color choices and a setting to use lower contrast text. Font sizes and paragraph spacing can be changed to make it more compact. My app has a built in adblocker too for the built in browser.

My app has reply push notifications too which I don’t think any of the other HN apps have.

As for the font, Product Sans is not legally allowed to be used by third parties as far as I am aware:

https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/102262/can...

My app allows you to change fonts too and it supports Montserrat font which looks visually similar to Product Sans.

Please consider putting this on F-droid. Many people here don't use Google services and you're likely missing out on many downloads (including mine)

Thanks for the idea. I will research F droid and put it on there.

The text to speech goes through speech dispatcher which by default probably uses espeak. I believe there are better text to speech engines like festival which you should be able to have speech dispatcher use quite easily but I've never tried this.

There seems to be some ways to do it in linux, but haven't tried myself yet: https://askubuntu.com/questions/953509/how-can-i-change-the-...

I'm not super fond of having to run any particular background service for this.

Oh that must be new but it looks so useful. I had eye laser last year and looked a lot for exactly something like that for my 3-4 days of literally just laying down and not doing much, but couldn't find anything like this. My plan was to open the Gutenberg project HTML books (or plain text) and have the browser read them, but nothing satisfied me (specially since there was no "pause/scrub" in the ones I did find). Ended up listening to audiobooks in youtube and that was good enough.

Wow, never tried the voices before and they are hilarious on Linux (tried en-GB).

I just wish Firefox Focus had reader mode. It's my default browser on my phone, which gets me around free article limits on some sites, so having to open it in another browser can defeat that purpose.

You can now set regular Firefox to behave like Focus (Settings > delete browsing data on quit), and it does have reader mode.

No tts in Firefox for Android, sadly. That'd be really useful. Is there no way for Android apps to use the built-in system tts?

Yes, there is. Styx Browser on Fdroid has implemented it and also many other powerful features. Give a try, won't look back.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com